THE SHOEMAKER’S STORY.

THERE are towns in France so associated with coals and cotton that no
traveller expects to meet with aught else upon their borders, and it is only as
a halting‐place breaking the long journey into Belgium that any traveller would
naturally spend a night at St. Quintin, unless he were a philanthropist bent
upon a visit to the famous cité ouvrière of
Guise, known to manufacturing Europe as a twin rival of our own Saltaire. A
tourist giving two hours to the town, after a night spent at a railway hotel
amid the whistles of the luggage trains on that Great Northern line, sees before
him a very wide street, sloping uphill, to the not unpicturesque town. On the
right is the cathedral, nearly a mile away; on the left rises the great roof of
an old abbey now used as a spinning factory. On the broad pavement are pots and
pans, carrots and onions, boots
page: 297 and slippers
and wooden shoes; and right in the midst of the thoroughfare, where it spreads
out into a wide circle, is a monument; it is large and imposing, and on the top
stands a female figure; her head is ornamented with a diadem of battlements, and
her right hand rests upon a spinning‐wheel; she symbolizes the good town of St.
Quintin, the town of spinners; but on either side of her are bas‐reliefs of a
battlefield commanded by an elderly general in spectacles, and at her back,
facing the upper street, is sculptured the haughty inspired head of the “Fou
Furieux” Leon Gambetta.

And this was the short story told by the shoemaker.

It was the very fag‐end of the siege of Paris, and the great city could hold out
no longer, and a general effort was ordered to be made of troops fighting all
round about, so that the sortie which we now call the Battle of Buzenval, the
last sortie from Paris, which took place on the 21st of January, might have a
chance of success. And it nearly did have it, for the French were uppermost on
that dark winter afternoon, when they were forced to desist by the waning
day‐
page: 298 light
daylight
from pushing on to the Prussian headquarters at Versailles. That was
the sortie in which Regnier the artist was killed in his glorious youth. He was
a “Prix de Rome,” and all his early works announced a future of unsurpassed
success. In that same famous fatal sortie marched a more elderly professor. He
was then past forty, the father of many boys, and the very last human being with
whom could be associated ideas of bloodshed; from him, as he sits in his velvet
cap, may be heard the story of what happened at Buzenval.

But Buzenval, whenever planned, did not come off till the 21st of January, and by
some dismal mistake, or the want of some necessary communication such as was for
ever happening in that saddest war, General Faidherbe and his Army of the North
turned up at St. Quintin and met the Germans on the 19th, two days too soon. The
shoemaker said one could read all about it in any history of the war; so one
could, but not so graphically as he told it to me in his shop in the midst of
the town. Thus:—

“The man with the spectacles managed his troops so well, that after fighting all
through
page: 299 one day and part of the next, they
beat; and this also perpetually happened in the side issues of the war. But
then—along that northern railway connecting St. Quintin with Paris, and having
started from the occupied zone encircling the besieged city, came up train after
train filled with fresh, well‐fed Germans. Shriek went the whistles as the men
with spiked helmets got out of the carriages and formed. It seemed to the St.
Quintin people as if the trains would never have done coming, and by dusk
General Faidherbe was beaten back, and the town of St. Quintin was given over to
pillage for over two hours.”

“Pillage! It was said the Germans never pillaged!”

“Ah, well, this was an open town, and our gendarmes had fought with the regular
French troops, which, being an irregular proceeding, was punished by
pillage.”

“And what did the Germans really do?” said the hearer, looking with troubled eyes
up the broad, busy street.

Said the shoemaker, “Luckily for us it was just dark, or matters would have gone
much
page: 300 worse. What they did was to run into
the cafés and drink the wine, and if they wanted anything, boots for instance,
they carried off five or six pairs to be sure of a fit, and so on with
clothes—shirts, drawers, and stockings; but it was certainly a great mercy that
they rushed round for two hours in the dark, or we should have been much worse
off.”

“And was there a great slaughter on the battle‐field outside the town?”

“Yes, the worst was by the windmill which you can see sculptured on the monument.
Altogether I suppose there were from fifteen to twenty thousand killed or
wounded.”

“Alas! mothers’ sons! and all for nothing, absolutely nothing!”

“And what became of the man in spectacles?”

“Ah! General Faidherbe is now Commander‐in‐chief of the Legion of Honour, and
lives at the Chancellerie in Paris; but he was so crippled by the rheumatism he
caught in all his campings out, that he goes about in a little chair on wheels
in which he pushes himself along, you know. You can see him any day.”

page: 301

Perhaps this was legendary; perhaps Faidherbe did not propel himself along the
quays like the crippled artists upon the pavement, but the shoemaker fully
believes that he did. What is certain is that he lived for nineteen years
longer, bearing, as did so many thousand others, the penalty of broken health as
the result of the campaigns of 1870‐71.